Saturday, October 06, 2007

A great analogy that explains the dilemma of our “redistribution program” here in America (welfare, food stamps, or Medicaid, etc.) is one of a triplex.I must thank Neal Boortz for this analogy (his book, The Terrible Truth About Liberals), by the by.

Our government, as our Constitution says, derives its powers “from the consent of the governed.”The idea here is that we cannot and should not ask the government to do anything for us that we cannot legally or morally do for ourselves.Sounds logical, doesn’t it?With that premise in mind, lets build the following scenario.

You live in a triplex.You are in apartment No. 1, Johnson is in apartment No. 2, and Wilson lives in No. 3.You discover that Wilson is ill and cannot work.He never bothered to buy a health insurance policy because he just didn’t believe he would need it for quite some time.Wilson, it seems, is not good at making rational decisions.He has no savings because it was more important to use that money for bondo on his Camaro and a good Panama CityBeach vacation every summer.

You believe that Wilson is about to starve to death.His electricity is going to be cut off, and he can’t afford to buy his blood pressure medication.You decide to help, charitable soul that you are.You scrounge through your bank account and find $200 to help your neighbor out.

Good for you.What a guy!

A month later Wilson is still in trouble.Your $200 wasn’t enough.It turns out that he spent $20 for a case of beer and at least another $100 or so at the horse races.Things may not be all that desperate, though.One of the thirty-five Lotto tickets he bought with that carton of cigarettes might pan out.

You decide to visit Johnson in apartment No. 2 to see if he can chip in.Johnson tells you that, while he certainly understands the seriousness of Wilson’s situation, he needs his money to send his daughter to college in the fall and to pay some of his own medical bills.Besides, he’s trying to save up some cash for a down payment on a house so he can get out of this weird apartment building.

You make the determination that it is far more important for Wilson to have some of Johnson's money than it is for Johnson to keep it and spend it on his own daughter’s education and a new home.So, here’s the question:

“Do you have the right to pull out a gun and point it right at the middle of Johnson’s forehead?Can you use that gun to compel Johnson to hand over a few hundred dollars for Wilson's care, and then tell Johnson that you’ll be back for more next month?”

Obviously, when put like this, you won’t run into too many people who will tell you that they have the right to take Johnson's money by force and give it to Wilson.They might say that they would try to talk Johnson into being a bit more charitable, but they don’t think that they have the right to just rob him at gunpoint.But this is the next question:

“Well, if our government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, how can you ask your government to do something for you that, if you did it for yourself, would be a crime?Why would it not be OK for you to take that money from Johnson by force and give it to Wilson, but it would be perfectly OK with you if the government went ahead and did it?”

Last time I checked, IRS agents were armed.

Click to Enlarge

Another way to put this is an example from J. Budziszewski’s book, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man:

On a dark street, a man draws a knife and demands my money for drugs.

Instead of demanding my money for drugs, he demands it for the Church.

Instead of being alone, he is with a bishop of the Church who act as bagman.

Instead of drawing a knife, he produces a policeman who says I must do as he says.

Instead of meeting me on the street, he mails me his demand as an official agent of the government.

If the first is theft, it is difficult to see why the other four are not also theft.

(Above) New Thoughts on the Mark... those are tiny radio frequency chips.

Many years ago I mentioned to my uncle (who is an investment manager) that he should invest in this company when before it went public -- Verichip Corp -- based solely on Revelations.Why is this? Well, in Revelations, (which is known by manuscript evidence, Biblical criticism, and archeology, to have been written 1,910[+-5 years]), a mark is mentioned in a time period before there was any way to even think about tracking and tagging everyone’s moves or purchases.

16 He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, 17 so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. (Rev 13:16-17)

Every time you watch the video or read an article on this technology, the right arm is always involved.

How could you stop someone from purchasing something in the first-century world when money or labor was traded for everything?Only in our day is money possibly to be replaced by electronic "credit" (credit cards, debit cards, and the like).

The videos below are somewhat recent (I haven’t come the Fox News one that spurred this post), some of the info below is geared more towards the health care aspect of this technology, another is a about the convenience it would give people. I would say if it was offered with a 20% discount at grocery stores, almost every person would get it.Convenience equals submission in my minds eye. Take note of the last two items, one is a video the other a story about an exclusive beach. Both show how people are very susceptible to this thinking.

US group implants electronic tags in workers

By Richard Waters in San Francisco

February 12 2006

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them.

CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police.

Embedding slivers of silicon in workers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as one of the next big growth industries.

RFID chips – inexpensive radio transmitters that give off a unique identifying signal – have been implanted in pets or attached to goods so they can be tracked in transit.

“There are very serious privacy and civil liberty issues of having people permanently numbered,” said Liz McIntyre, who campaigns against the use of identification technology.

But Sean Darks, chief executive of CityWatcher, said the glass-encased chips were like identity cards. They are planted in the upper right arm of the recipient, and “read” by a device similar to a cardreader.

“There’s nothing pulsing or sending out a signal,” said Mr Darks, who has had a chip in his own arm. “It’s not a GPS chip. My wife can’t tell where I am.”

The technology’s defenders say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory. But critics say any implanted device could be used to track the “wearer” without their knowledge.

VeriChip – the US company that made the devices and claims to have the only chips that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration – said the implants were designed primarily for medical purposes.

So far around 70 people in the US have had the implants, the company said.

OCEAN CITY, N.J. — At the beach of the future, high tide will meet high tech.

Visitors will wear wristbands that automatically debit their bank accounts or credit cards to pay for beach access, food and parking. Garbage cans will e-mail cleanup crews when they're ready to be emptied.

And people won't even think about trying to sneak in: Beach checkers could scan the sands with handheld devices and instantly know who didn't pay.

One of the cornerstone theories within evolutionary (neo-Darwinian) thinking has been “natural selection.”Natural selection, long thought to be the initiating force behind the many changes that would have needed to occur if evolutionary theory is correct, is now being abandoned or at least moved a few notches down in importance.There is a lot of information below, so take you time, watch the video posted and the other (Dean Kenyon) I linked to further down in the post.If you are a biology student, you may learn quite a bit more than the teacher would have liked you to, for, you see… the modern day biology teacher isn’t going to teach you that there are disagreements within the scientific community on these issues, he or she is merely there in that classroom to protect a dogma.

Take note that this dated response was part of a larger conversation, so you will see names (handles) of people that I respond to.

Natural Selection & Circular Reasoning

Rapier, the site you referenced is well received. The evidence from the pre-Cambrian shows that oxygen was indeed present, in large number. This fact did away with the Miller – Urey experiment and the others that followed, as they posited an oxygen free environment. However, the site you mentioned rests on two glaring problems. I will elucidate somewhat. The first being:

“No matter whether the atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and others were there at Earth's formation, or arrived later in alien bodies from space, they constituted the building blocks of life. These elements by intrinsic chemical nature formed organic compounds that were washed by rain into the seas…. The very nature of carbon chemical bonding to itself and other atoms predetermines the formation of organic compounds, and the subsequent catalyzing of more complex organic compounds.”

This concept of “carbon chemical bonding to itself and other atoms predetermines the formation of organic compounds” is commonly referred to as Biochemical Predestination. The term was coined by Dean H. Kenyon (and his co-author G. Steinman) who wrote a university level textbook on this subject. {FYI} Kenyon is the (he might be retired) professor of biology at the University of San Francisco and was a staunch evolutionist when he wrote the book Biochemical Predestination (McGraw-Hill, 1969), which was the best-selling advanced level book on chemical evolution in the decade of the 1970’s. Keep in mind that these two guys started this line of thought. One of Dean Kenyon’s students gave him a copy of a book written by Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith (who holds three earned Ph.D.’s) entitled The Creation of Life: A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution. In this book by Dr. Wilder, Dean Kenyon’s book is critiqued. Instead of Kenyon saying – “Well, Dr. Wilder is just a creationist, who would listen to him?” – Dr. Kenyon read the book and tried to answer the arguments in it against his own book. When he couldn’t, he began to investigate where the evidence led to… outside of his previous presuppositions, which were based on naturalism (evolutionary thinking).

Now, Dr. Kenyon refutes with the latest evidence offered, this can be found in an excellent video entitled Unlocking the Mystery of Life. When you said, “Firstly, you need to do some researching on the history of our planet…”, I have. I will comment again that I have over 2,000 books in my home library, and outside of politics, the creation / evolution controversy takes up most of the space. I have over 100 books by evolutionary biologists, archaeologists, physicists, geologists, etc. Also, I have well over 200 books by creation biologists, archaeologists, physicists, geologists, etc. I wonder if you have gone to the sources themselves like I have… in other words, read some good books on the matter at hand. Just a challenge for you to be open-minded, that’s all. Kenyon, for instance, says:

“No experimental system yet devised has provided the slightest clue as to how biologically meaningful sequences of subunits might have originated in prebiotic polynucleotides or polypeptides.”

He put in his two cents on the problem of chirality as well, “Many researchers have attempted to find plausible natural conditions under which [left-handed] L-amino acids would preferentially accumulate over their [right-handed] D-counterparts, but all such attempts have failed. Until this crucial problem is solved, no one can say that we have found a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Instead, these isomer preferences point to biochemical creation.”

The reason I put those quotes there and will follow them with some papers by Dr. Kenyon is that since you referenced me to a site that mentions biochemical predestination, I figured you would want to read his latest work, as science is “self-critiquing,” he has critiqued the theory he helped found.

“The immutable law of natural selection dictates that life will retain those features that foster survival.”

This apparent simple sentence makes reference to two theories that really are not science or Law being that they incorporate circular reasoning, that is, natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

From a rabid anti-creationist (posted a year or so ago at Space Battles):

“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr [sic] Gish is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today…. Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity.” (Michael Ruse, professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph, Canada [recently moved to Florida], “How Evolution Became a Religion: Creationists Correct?” National Post, pp. B1,B3,B7 May 13, 2000.)

What Can It Explain?

To summarize what I have already written, the modern position of the synthetic theory is: the struggle for existence plays no part in evolution. The direction of evolution is determined solely by the characteristics of those animals and plants that are successful breeders. We are unable to say anything about why a particular characteristic might favor, or prejudice, the survival of any particular animal or plant.

Natural Selection

Perhaps an even more damaging criticism of the concept of natural selection is that – limited though its content may be – it is so nebulous that it can be made to fit a whole range of mutually contradictory outcomes of the evolutionary process. Natural selection is entirely compatible with the notion that all organisms in stable environments have reached a fitness peak on which they will remain forever. At the same time natural selection is entirely compatible with the idea that all organisms should regress to the safest common denominator, a single-celled organism, and thus become optimally adapted to every habitat.

In precisely the same way, because of its infinitely elastic (explained more later) definition, natural selection can be made to explain opposed and even mutually contradictory individual adaptations. For example, Darwinists claim that camouflage coloring and mimicry (as in leaf insects) is adaptive and will be selected for, yet they also claim that warning coloration (the wasp’s stripes) is adaptive and will be selected for. Yet if both propositions are true, any kind of coloration will have some adaptive value, whether it is partly camouflaged or partly warning, and will be selected for. As a theory, then, natural selection makes no unique predictions but instead is used retrospectively to explain every outcome: And a theory that explains everything in this way, explains nothing. Natural selection is not a mechanism: it is a rationalization after the fact.

Natural selection is the process by which the most successful populate the world, and the less successful breeders die out – regardless of their respective characteristics.

“The giraffe has a long neck because…?”

Here we get stuck. The only help we get from synthetic evolution is that the giraffe has survived because it has survived. (This can be applied to the person who tried to explain to me how the cleaner fish “evolved” to pick the teeth of its predator, as well as the below posts.)

Is It Testable? Can It Predict?

Ernst Mayr made some startling admissions about Darwin’s model of mutation and natural selection. He said, “Popper is right; this model is so good that it can explain everything, as popper has rightly complained.”This relates to the requirement in science that a theory or model must make exclusionary predictions. If the concept is so generalized that it can explain any conceivable type of evidence, then it is of no value to science. For example, if a theory can explain both dark and light coloring in moths, both the presence and absence of transitional forms in the fossil record, complex life forms either above or below in rock strata, etc., then it has no value in making predictions. Now, Dr. Mayr (who was professor of zoology at HarvardUniversity) believes that “ultimately, all variation is, of course, due to mutation….”

Professor Gould (Harvard’s esteemed paleontologist) has this to say when asked, “What role do mutations play in speciation?” Dr, Gould responded:

“A mutation doesn’t produce major new raw material. You don’t make a new species by mutating the species…. That’s a common idea people have; that evolution is due to random mutations. A mutation is NOT the cause of evolutionary change. Something else than natural selection brings about species at new levels, trends and directions.”

Keep in mind that Mayr and Gould are both evolutionists.

In a discussion of how evolutionary theory can explain the fact that eels, which normally reproduce only in salt water, have certain landlocked species that reproduce in fresh water, Dr Weisskopt said,

“I think it was Medawar who said that one thing about the theory of evolution [and he quoted Popper] that it is not falsifiable, that whatever happens you can explain it. I think you have an example here.”

On the same subject, Dr. Fraser said,

“It would seem to me that there have been endless statements made and the only thing I have clearly agreed with through the whole day [referring to the Wistar Symposium] has been the statement made by Karl Popper, namely, that the real inadequacy of evolution, esthetically and scientifically, is that you can explain anything you want by changing your variable around.”

George Wald agreed,

“This cannot be done in evolution, taking it in its broad sense, and this is really all I meant when I called it tautologous in the first place. It can, indeed, explain anything. You may be ingenious or not in proposing a mechanism which looks plausible to human beings… but it is still unfalsifiable theory.”

Dr. Schutzenberger of the University of Paris reported on why all attempts to program a model of evolution on a computer had completely failed. He said that neo-Darwinism asserts that without anything further, selection brings about a statistically adapted drift when random changes are performed in a population. He insisted,

“We believe that is not conceivable. In fact if we try to stimulate such a situation by making changes randomly at the typographic level (by letters or blocks, the size of the unit does not matter) on computer programs we find that we have no chance (i.e., less than one in ten to the thousandth power) even to see what the modified program would compute: it just jams. Thus… we believe that there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology.”

Near the end of the Symposium, Murray Eden explained:

“In consequence, the theory has been modified to the point that virtually every formulation of the principles of evolution is a tautology…. It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws – physical, physicochemical, and biological…. In summary, it is our contention that the principle task of the evolutionist is to discover and examine mechanisms which constrain the variation of phenotypes to a very small class and to relegate the notion of randomness to a minor non-crucial role.”

Observable, Repeatable, and Refutable?To the surprise of many casual observers, and to the embarrassment of many journalistic influences, evolution has never been demonstrated to be a viable explanation for life origins (or cosmic origins for that matter). By definition the scientific method requires that the objects or events under study must be OBSERVABLE, REPEATABLE, and REFUTABLE. Evolution certainly cannot be observed or repeated in the field or the laboratory. With this in mind, evolutionist Karl Popper, the honored referee of the modern scientific method, pointed out:

“It follows that any controversy over the question whether events which are in principle unrepeatable and unique ever do occur cannot be decided by science; it would be a metaphysical controversy.”

In his introduction to a 1971 publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, L. Harrison Matthews, British biologist and evolutionist, wrote:

“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory – is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation – both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.”

Intense controversy has erupted within the evolutionary camp. Newsweek featured an article by Sharon Begley titled “Science Contra Darwin.” She revealed:

“The great body of work derived from Charles Darwin’s revolutionary 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, is under increasing attack – and not just from creationists…. So heated is the debate that one Darwinian says there are times when he thinks about going into a field with more intellectual honesty: the used car business.”

Agnostic (non-creationist) Michael Denton (in his book Evolution: A Theory In Crisis) wrote that the evolutionary paradigm was, “… an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century theory….”

“If most evolutionary changes occur during speciation events and if speciation events are largely random, natural selection, long viewed as a process guiding evolutionary change, cannot play a significant role in determining the overall course of evolution.”

“Adaptation leads to natural selection, natural selection does not necessarily lead to greater adaptation ... Natural Selection operates essentially to enable the organisms to maintain their state of adaptation rather than improve it ... Natural selection over the long run does not seem to improve a species’ chances of survival, but simply enables it to ‘track,’ or keep up with, the constantly changing environment”

“Mutations, in time, occur incoherently. They are not complementary to one another, nor are they cumulative in successive generations toward a given direction. They modify what pre-exists, but they do so in disorder.”

“In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutation plus natural selection — quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology.”

ONE ASKS: “who survives?”

THE ANSWER: “the fittest.”

SO ONE ASKS: “who is the fittest?”

THE ANSWER: “those who survive.”

Philosophy professor Gregory Alan Pesely notes:

“One of the most frequent objections against the theory of natural selection is that it is a sophisticated tautology… What is most unsettling is that some evolutionary biologists have no qualms about proposing tautologies as explanations. One would immediately reject any lexicographer who tried to define a word by the same word, or a thinker who merely restated his proposition, or any other instance of gross redundancy; yet no one seems scandalized that men of science should be satisfied with a major principle which is no more than a tautology.”

Fitness does not always mean survival. The smartest, most resourceful persons are not necessarily those who leave the most offspring. So in recent years, evolutionists reduced the definition of “fitness” to simply “those who leave the most offspring.” But even this entails a rather circular argument. As geneticist Conrad Waddington of EdinburghUniversity noted:

“There, you do come to what is, in effect, a vacuous statement: ‘Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others;’ and you ask, ‘which leaves more offspring than others;’ and it is ‘those who leave more offspring;’ and there is nothing more to it than that,”

Friday, October 05, 2007

Islam is not a religion of peace, nor can it “modernize” or promise any long lasting “progressive” thinking.For a person to kill someone over something like you see below (even though no Christian actually drew anything of the sort), is a sure sign of a bankrupt religious philosophy.It’s sick!

Rampaging Muslims have killed 10 Christians, injured 61 others, destroyed nine churches and displaced more than 500 people in northern Nigeria, according to eyewitnesses – all because Muslim high school students claimed a Christian student had drawn a cartoon of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, on the wall of the school’s mosque.

The rampage occurred Sept. 28 in the town of Tudun Wada Dankadai, in Nigeria's northern state of Kano.

According to Compass Direct News, which specializes in reporting on Christian persecution worldwide, there are 1,500 students at the high school, called Government College-Tudun Wada Dankadai, of which only 14 are Christians, and only seven of those actually live on campus. The Christian students at the school insist no one ever saw the alleged cartoon, and furthermore that no one in the tiny minority group of Christians would have dared such a feat, especially during Ramadan.

"How can we take such a risk when we know that we are a minority and cannot stand [against] them?" Christian student Shehu Bawa told Compass. "This is a lie created to have a reason to attack us."

Eighteen-year-old student Iliya Adamu told Compass he was getting ready to go to class when a group of Muslim students stormed into his dorm and began to beat him.

"I was surprised that they were beating me without telling what I did," Adamu said. "I asked to know what was happening, and they claimed that one Christian student had gone to their mosque to draw a cartoon of Muhammad. In spite of my denying the act, they kept beating me."

Seeing the Muslim mob beating a Christian classmate named Sule La’azaru, Adamu ran to the principal's office for refuge, soon to be joined by the remaining Christian students there, according to the report.

Despite the attempts by the Muslim teachers to stop the rampage, Muslim students began throwing stones at the Christian students through the window of the principal's office, wounding student Ayuba Wada in the head.

"I was inside the office of our principal, with the others, when suddenly the Muslim students began throwing stones at us," Wada told Compass. "It was through this way that my head was broken. I was bleeding, and no help came as the situation became more riotous."

Eventually, the rampaging Muslim students broke into the principal's office, but the principal's arrival saved Wada's life, while the other Christians holed up there managed to escape the mob.

One of the Christian students, Shehu Bawa, told Compass his arrival on campus that morning was punctuated by shouts of "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is Great) "all over the school." In fact, he said, "The Muslim students were now attacking every Christian student on sight. Four of us ran into the office of the vice principal, but when it was finally broken into by the Muslim students, we ran out and escaped."

What about the alleged cartoon of Muhammad, rumors of which instigated the attacks?

"We suspect that either one of the Muslim students in the school did this to create an excuse for us to be attacked, or that a Muslim fanatic from the town might have done this to spark off a fight among Muslims and Christians," said Bawa. "How could we have done this when Muslim students are always around the mosque day and night because of the Ramadan?"

The rampage spreads far and wide

After attacking the few Christian students in their school, the rampaging Muslim students poured into the streets of Tudun Wada, joined now by other Muslims. For the next four hours, reports Compass, the growing mob burned down Christian churches, vandalized Christian property and murdered innocents.

Among the churches burned were: St. Mary’s Catholic Church; St. George’s Anglican Church; Evangelical Church of West Africa; Assemblies of God Church; FirstBaptistChurch; a Pentecostal church called the Mountain of Fire and MiraclesChurch; an African independent church, the Cherubim and SeraphimChurch; and two other Pentecostal churches, The Chosen Bible Church and DeeperLifeBibleChurch.

The 10 Christians murdered included: Augustine Odoh and his younger brother Cosmos Odoh, both members of St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Another Catholic, Joseph Eze, was also killed. When Compass filed its initial report, the corpses of the three Catholics were lying at the CityHospital in Kano city. Seven other Christians murdered were buried in a common grave Wednesday, but government workers did not allow relatives or church leaders to identify the corpses.

The dozens of injured are being treated at the Assumpta Clinic, Nomansland in Sabon Gari area of Kano city.

According to Musa Ahmadu Haruna, the priest of St. George’s Anglican Church, Tudun Wada Dankadai, whose church was burned, no Christian student in the school could have drawn an image of Muhammad.

"None of these students is capable of drawing a cartoon on a mosque," he told Compass Direct. "That is a frame-up to find a reason to attack us."

Another pastor, Rabiu Danbawa of the Evangelical Church of West Africa, said that upon hearing of the waves of attacks on Christians, he moved toward the town's center to see for himself what was transpiring.

"I stood as they set fire on our churches one by one," he told Compas Direct. "There was nothing I could do," he said, adding, "I did not know the fate of my wife and my children." When he went to the local police station for help, Danbawa found the police turning away Christians who had run there to escape the attack. "We were told to leave, as our safety could not be guaranteed," he said, in tears, according to Compass Direct. "Women and children all scampered to the bush, only to be attacked by the Muslims who had already hid themselves in the bush awaiting their Christian prey."

It wasn't until several days later that Danbawa found his wife and children safe.

Accoroding to reports from Compass, Danbawa and his family are now refugees in Dogon Kawo village, along with other Christian victims. None have food or shelter, he said.

Even Christian policemen were not immune, with about 30 officers and their families being attacked and their homes looted and set on fire.

Last week's massacre comes in respose to a call in July by the Sultan of Sokoto, Abubakar III, to Muslims in northern Nigeria to rise against Christianity. Kano's state government has led the way in northern Nigeria for the implementation of sharia Islamic law.

Mark Lipdo, director of the Stefanos Foundation, which ministers to persecuted Christians in Nigeria, told Compass he's shocked that the Nigerian government has done nothing to help the injured and displaced.

"It is surprising that an overwhelming thing like this that has displaced thousands of Christians is not known to the Nigerian government," he said, noting that the government initially downplayed the mass rampage. "The government must act to check such unprovoked attacks against Christians."

And Haruna of St. George’s Anglican Church said, "We are living under persecution in Kano state, and yet, we are being told that we are under a democratic government. Do Muslims really want us to co-exist together as a nation? I doubt so."

As WND reported in May, Christians in Nigeria, who make up about half the population, fears the imposition of Islamic law throughout that nation.

The reports documented six children burned to ashes in front of their father, according to Voice of the Martyrs.

WND also has reported nearly 1,000 homes of Christians and many churches have been destroyed in these regions.

"If you go around villages, you will see people missing one hand or one foot," explained Rev. Obiora Ike. "Do you think that's the result of an illness? That is the result of sharia law."

More than 10,000 Christians have been martyred in the region since the Islamic law was imposed in the region in 1999, and Voice of the Martyrs has helped surviving family members through its Families of Martyrs Fund with Care Packs, Village Outreach packs and words of encouragement to believers who stand for their faith "amidst volatile, uncertain conditions."